


Adorns the Withered Tree

by grendelity



Category: Twelfth Night - Shakespeare
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 14:33:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/31257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grendelity/pseuds/grendelity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The sun is kinder than Olivia remembers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Adorns the Withered Tree

**Author's Note:**

  * For [loveslashangst](https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveslashangst/gifts).



> Ret-cons a fair amount of Act III, scene i.

Olivia's grief is a sentient creature, heavy coil of scales and wickedly hooked claws. It suffocates, it buries, its movement is slow and inevitable as the pull of time. She does not wish to die, because Olivia is a countess and she is not dreadful but rather bereaved. But while she does not wish to die, she does not either wish to live, and for a time, she prayed with an empty, blank mind. She knelt, bowed over her hands, and she said, Oh, God, and waited, the scents of dust and earth thick in her nose.

This divinity undone, what is this? For Olivia is alive, irrefutably, incontrovertibly. She exists in a not altogether Puritan realm, but life. Life itself is not altogether pure, either. These thoughts of not-life are damning in a peculiar way, surely as though she scaled the roof and plunged to an end upon the stones below. She grieves. Her skin sags and wrinkles, aged fruit in cloaked storage, and she grieves. Her hands clasped tightly before her, her back stiff.

Oh, God.  
\--  
The sun is kinder than she remembers.

Cesario is fresh and young, all stripling length and boy's smooth face. His clothes ill-fit him, trousers bunching at the fold of his legs as he crouches at the tangled sprawl of root and stem, but he is innocent, and his knees splay askew as he leans forward to draw his fingertips along the curled velvet of a Lenten rose's petal. Shadows flicker over his shoulders and he looks up, squinting into a smile. 'How now, my Lady?'

She lifts her chin, turns her face and considers him through the veil of her eyelashes. Her heart pangs under the weight of his eyes, his vibrance and his youth and his groundless swell of purity, and at last, she looks instead at the sky as it peers through leaves and limb. 'What do you think of me, Cesario?'

His eyes follow and he nets his fingers. He wets his lips and hesitates--a great, aching stretch of silence--and at last, at last: 'Once, my master spoke to his humble servant.' And he hesitates again, and Olivia desperately retreats. Coy. Strange, even, this reference, this careful regard. Cesario traces his finger across delicate veins of snow-white petal and and speaks to the bloom. 'He said that you upon his eyes was a balm. A very healing upon the whole land, the realm of God. Upon his soul, as well.'

'I asked Cesario's mind. Not that of his Lord's.'

He looks askance at her, his eyes wide with surprise. 'I think not so, my Lady. I am but my Lord's vassal. I read but from his text.' He spreads his hands as though in helpless prayer. 'I speak but his mind.'

'And?' and she says softly, undaring. 'And thou, Cesario? What of thy mind?'

'My Lord's text--'

'I ask not of your Lord. Thy mind, Cesario. What of it?'

'My mind is servant, too, to my Lord. I am my Lord's servant, and he is yours. Your servant's servant is so yours. And so....' He straightens and brushes his fingers briskly against his trousers. Shadows flicker over his shoulders. He meets her gaze and his lips quirk again into a smile. 'Aye, my Lady. Thou art a balm.'

Her heart, so caged in her chest, aches, as though throbbing against fetter and chain. 'I would that Cesario says so, then rather his Lord.' Her lips twist and she turns away. Blackness roils within her. 'The pool that drowned that poor youth was not so cruel. It spoke the truth reflected upon it to his fair ears. It was honest.'

'My Lady doubts my honesty?' And his expression is true and open, a page upon which she could read his innocence in the spite of her desperation.

'Your Lady doubts the source. And so, the mind you share with your master. I doubt not thy voice, though thy very words are snakes.' She hugs her arms and studies the twisted limbs of tree before her. It is a sad, pathetic offering: a withered branch lifts bare fingers to its siblings' leaves, its own bark bleached and long-dead. It, too, is caught between not-life and not-death, dragged to the sky with force of will, and she thinks, erroneously, of perhaps offering a garland of sturdy winter flowers to this her twin. 'No servant of mine should be so loveless,' she murmurs.

'Loveless? I love thee as I should, your Ladyship.' She releases her breath in a harsh _hah,_ bitter on her tongue. Her eyes trace the jagged line of dead wood, and she thinks of cypress and willow. A twig snaps underfoot as Cesario shifts and sighs, and she shutters her eyes. 'Loveless,' he says, and it is statement, now. 'I think not so, my Lady.'

'No?' She does not open her eyes. Sunlight stains the undersides of her lids blazon-red, incarnadine darkness. 'I beg thee proof.'

Cesario echoes her, perhaps, lilting and puzzled, but the wind gusts and buffets her, roars in her ears a twist of spring cloaked in hard winter's edge. Her dress clings to her legs and twines her frame, and her hair lifts from her face. She feels bared, clean, blind in her darkness but naked also, and free. She is intensely aware of movement, crack and release of weight, and a nervous curiosity that approaches with a growing warmth like the sun that filters through endless winter.

He hesitates again, close to her, and she doesn't dare move as she stands and breathes his breath, his heat and his scent of skin and horse sweat and leather and underneath, something very clean. She does not open her eyes, but she inhales in as though she might drown, should she not, and it is as though a thread connects them and his lips meet hers in a clumsy collision.

She opens her eyes, then, and he is blushing, his eyes shut tight like a chaste boy kissing a milkmaid, his hands firmly at his sides. She parts her lips and tilts her head, responds to his most vulnerable of actions, and she studies his sweet face, his earnest concentration. Her heart fluttering like a trapped bird's wings: futilely, frantically. She lifts her hands and places them on his cheeks, as if in prayer, and his eyes startle open. Her fingers curl into his hair and she leans into him.

'My most humble apologies, madam,' he murmurs, and untangles her fingers, leaves her grasping at nothing. 'My presumption knows no bounds.' He averts his eyes, furrows his brow, and his throat jerks as he swallows. He bows his head and turns away, and she says nothing to call him back. Now she does close her eyes, though all she can see still is the vivid depth of the sky, and she lifts her fingers and places them on her lips, and she breathes air cool and dry as a crypt's, feels the startling clutch of realization that he has left her truly, finally alone.  
\--  
The world shifts, the whole of it moves, its essence changes in order to remain as ever the same. Illyria's winter breaks and thaws into spring.

Cesario moans love into her open mouth and she marks this as a victory, a hard-won admission in a fight that named her a warrior. He is different, now that she has triumphed him, he is more a man: he is stronger, his hands rougher, his scent richer like the sea. His innocent confusion becomes happy wonder, his clever words not so sad. He is a soldier, now, a master and a prince, and he breathes his servitude into her, pledges himself and her chest fills with his life and she calls him by his new name of _husband, husband._

Darkness cloaks them in a staggered, drunken disguise, jerking with the candle's light, and the air burgeons with the scents of wax and dried flowers, dust. Sweat and the clean, wild edge of the wind. Cesario's naked skin is warm and smooth beneath her hands, and her fingers quest, seek to map his unevenness, his imperfections. 'Madam shames the moon,' he whispers, his breath warm on her cheek. 'The sun hides from thee.' His hands knead at her skin, his hair brushes over her face in a ticklish fringe. He bends and kisses along her bare breasts, tasting the creases of her skin.

'Stay,' she commands to the darkness. 'Stay, and I shall build thee a temple.' Her voice is soft as the wind, hushed against the curve of his shoulder. 'An altar of strongest oak, polished bright, upon which I offer my heart and soul.'

He laughs, then, a low, rippling sound that steals her breath. 'An altar at which I worship, madam?' He kisses her throat. 'I worship thee now, poor priest that I am.' He pulls away, and her nails drag hard lines of protest along his sides as he bends his knees and settles between her legs. The candlelight flickers across him, casts his face into sharp, warm relief. Her eyes scan his presented figure: span of smooth chest and lines of his belly, wandering trail of coarse hair that nests his youth indeed, his swelling arousal. She feels the candle's light on her like fire, as though the whole of her skin hums with energy and sparks, the twisting flame of living blood, and she breathes and lifts her gaze once more to his face. He smiles--an even gleam of teeth that is not so surprising as perhaps it should be--and his hands trace her shape and mold over her curves of hip. 'See thus how I kneel before thee, goddess.'

'Pray then, pilgrim,' she whispers. 'Prove us your devotions.' She crooks her knees and his hands move, sliding to cup into the folds of her legs. He presses his lips to her knee in tender confession, trails his lips to leave a hot line over her thigh, and then he bends and kisses gently again between her legs, and she swallows and gasps. Her hands find the tousle of his hair and she perhaps says his name but perhaps not, for the air crackles with energy, the roar of her heartbeat like the far-away sea.

She squeezes her eyes shut and she swallows again, opens her mouth and tastes woodsmoke and sweat upon the air. Her knees tremble over his bare shoulders, her ankles against his thighs. He licks and sucks at her with fervor, with the beatific ardor of consecration, as though she bears some holy milk. Tears prick at her eyes as his tongue finds a hard knot of flesh and he laps and curls against her and kisses, and kisses. Her hips jerk up and his hands slide over the curves of her flesh, hold her there trembling.

He rocks his weight forward and climbs up her length, his mouth finding her skin in wet kiss-spots: her rib, her nipple, her collarbone, her chin. She opens her eyes and her hands crawl up his sides, become claws and hold him close, her breath ragged against his skin. He bumps his nose against hers and meets her eyes as he spreads her, fits into her, and she arches against him and makes an inarticulate sound against his lips.

He quirks his smile and he braces his weight on her either side and he breathes her hair and he moves, ruts against her, into her, and her vision flutters and whitens. Sparks shatter her, lift her and dash against her like waves. Olivia rises and crests, shivers and breaks apart, heat lashing through her and boiling the blackness from her speared heart, and she dies. She dies and she lives and she dies again, born anew into a world of fire and sunshine, of ash whipped away on a clean wind and borne to the sea.

The candles flicker, their light warm and wavering, heady. Cesario sleeps curled into her like a child, his forehead pressed to her shoulder, his face relaxed and boyish. She traces the line of his brow with her fingertip, gently presses her thumb to his lips. She reaches for his fingers and she closes her hands around his, clasped against her chest. 'Oh, God,' she says quietly, her voice lost in the night.

She presses his fingers to her lips, and the candles gutter and die and plunge them finally into true darkness.

**Author's Note:**

> My heart is weak and my mind is weaker, and I tentatively think this has exhausted my ability to write Shakespeare fan fiction forever. This may be one of the hardest things I've ever written. Never before have I felt so crippled by my usual anime/manga fandom wanderings. I watched Trevor Nunn's _Twelfth Night_ about four times through in order to get my head around this.
> 
> 1\. _The pool that drowned that poor youth was not so cruel. It spoke the truth reflected upon it to his fair ears. It was honest._ Narcissus. Come on, you can't talk about Shakespeare without obscure reference to antiquity.
> 
> 2\. _Her eyes trace the jagged line of dead wood, and she thinks of cypress and willow._ Funeral boughs. My family had a teeny little cypress tree for Christmas, and when I cheerfully and morbidly told my mother that she was decorating with a mourning-tree, she looked at me like I had two heads.
> 
> 3\. Thees/thys/thous: shut up. I refrained as much as I could, but intimacy/familiarity begged it. Logic, logic.
> 
> 4\. _...and she calls him by his new name of husband, husband._ Let us suppose that Olivia never calls Sebastian Cesario. Please. I mean, they got through a _wedding_ without him slamming on the breaks; if she did, canonically, possibly he just goes, "...lol, milady's crazy. I like her." Humor me.
> 
> 5\. [Hilarious Cesario/Olivia theme song forever](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lkaf9PdlNM).


End file.
